An interesting list of words that started out as acronyms that I came across recently…most of them you’ll know, but still.
(actually…I looked it up. After reading The View From Saturday for Language Arts. I highly recommend that book, by the way. It’s lovely. I was however disappointed that POSH and TIP are thought not to be acronyms, like the book asserts.)
are you ready?
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Here we go….
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It’s coming…
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walloon.
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*laughs hysterically*
This is a site run by the United Nations, designed to increase your vocabulary and feed poor people at the same time.
It’s essentially a semifun (in the manner of school disguised as entertainment) game wherein a word and four possible definitions show up on your screen. You click on the one you think is correct. If you’re right, the FreeRice people donate 20 grains of rice to starving people. If you’re wrong, you try again, or stop playing and curse at your computer. Your choice.
Yesterday 110,091,680 grains of rice were sent to poor people around the world.
Check it out: FreeRice
Now, what I want to know is, who gets to count the grains? And if starving people complain about meager portions, do the volunteers say, “Well, I’m sorry, but Matthew Johnson has a really bad vocabulary.”
On another charity-related note, because I saw a poster at church this morning and it just happened to pop into my head, the Souper Bowl of Caring is coming up, so donate your soup cans!
I have decided to post these because I am sort of a wordy kind of person, and I was going through my computer files and came across my word lists from last year. Those of you who were in our SAT prep class know what I mean. Every two weeks we had to submit a list of twenty words, with setences and definitions, that we found in a book from our list of classics. These are some of my favorites.
1-Verisimilitude: The appearance of being true.
2- Cosh: a short club, or the act of hitting with a short club (doesn’t it sound innocent if you cosh your little brother, rather than hit him with a baseball bat?) Another great word with the same meaning is truncheon.
3- Grappa: a sort of Italian brandy.
4- Frowsy: junky, messy, or shabby. Amaze your parents by using a vocabulary word to describe your room.
And my personal favorite:
5- Farinaceous: having a grainy or mealy texture. For some reason this one stuck in my head. It comes from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, one of my favorite books.
